"Most art professors know that maybe only two out of a hundred art majors will go on to become serious artists…visual art is an area with the greatest population of idealistic students with dreams of celebrity without the basic talent to reach those dreams. They are focused on the image of being an artist but they lack the substance and creative drive that makes them an artist."
A Short History of James Mellick Entry No.1, September 29, 2006
This writing will give the background of experience that has shaped the values and opinions expressed throughout this journal. As a young artist I enjoyed reading about the lives of other artists to draw comparisons to my own experience. This journal is intended to speak to young artists beginning their own journey. I've written a great deal about the art world-mostly letting off steam-but it sits in my hard drive and much has never been published. Now it seems that everyone has their own BLOG so I guess I will give the phenomenon a try. I've written a lot to other artists and friends and most of that is lost in cyberspace.
I will be turning sixty years-old this March but I'm not ready to write my autobiography. Maybe I'm waiting to see if I can still do some bad things to spice up the personal story but time is short and my testosterone is decreasing. I never used drugs, can't drink more than one beer at a time and I've been faithful to the same woman for 36 years, so I don't have much to write about in the tabloid genre.
Most art professors know that maybe only two out of a hundred art majors will go on to become serious artists. A friend once told me that visual art is an area with the greatest population of idealistic students with dreams of celebrity without the basic talent to reach those dreams. They are focused on the image of being an artist but they lack the substance and creative drive that makes them an artist. I'll call this the "Andy Warhol Syndrome".
I am a minister's son and one of five boys who went on to become professionals in philosophy, medicine, the military and art. My father set the environment for reading, writing and forming ideas and opinions. My mother was more of the artist in small acts of creativity that added some cultural quality to the home life. She taught crafts in the church and created much of the wood furniture in our home because she "wanted to have something nice". This creation of something out of nothing stayed with me the rest of my life.
As a young child I had no dreams of becoming an artist. I had no formal art education in high school. Art was a recreational pastime; something that most of the boys did at the kitchen table. It was how we entertained ourselves. This also applied to our interest in music.
When I attended Greenville College, a small Christian college in Southern Illinois, I had plans to become a social worker and earned a degree in Sociology. Greenville was just establishing an art program and my first art professor, Paul Wolber encouraged me to become an art major as well. The young art department had only two professors so most of my experience was in painting with a sculpture thrown in now and then. Given the time, painting then was strongly abstract expressionism but I already had my eyes and heart on Pop Art and Minimalism. One of the last paintings I did in college was a shaped canvas, monochrome painting, based on the "Birth of Venus". David Huntley, the Chairman of the Art and Design department at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, juried the student show at Greenville and gave the painting first prize. It was David Huntley who encouraged me to apply to the graduate program at S.I.U.-E. I taught elementary art in the Highland, Illinois Public Schools system for two years during which I began graduate studies by taking evening classes, commuting 36 miles to the university. For better or worse, I did not have a degree in education. So, I am where I am today because I was recruited by two art professors saw my potential in college. I did not start out with an over-inflated and over-esteemed view that I was an artist. I just was.
My brothers were the first generation to go and complete college and certainly the first to achieve the highest degrees in our fields. In the 1960's college was a heady, intellectual and cultural experience. Greenville was a liberal arts school so I took classes in science, foreign language, history, literature, philosophy and religion along with my social science and art majors. The content of much of my art today stems from this broad experience. I spent many hours talking the theory and aesthetics of art with my professors. Several years after grad school I ran into David Huntley at a college art conference and he referred to me as a "Renaissance" artist and teacher.
In graduate school I majored in painting but by my second year (1972) the paintings were becoming hard edged and three dimensional. By my Master of Fine Arts thesis show in 1973 my painting style was comprised of vertical, shaped-canvas totemic forms in a 1 foot by 8 foot format. In 1972, two of these paintings were purchased into the permanent collection of the Swope Museum in Terre Haute, IN. The title of my written thesis was "Totemic Meaning, Iconoclasm and the Vertical Image". A few years after graduate school I was told that my thesis was still being used as a standard for new graduate students. The late painter, Michael J. Smith was my thesis chairman, and if I remember correctly, my thesis committee was made up of the Don Davis (painting), Floyd Coleman (art history) and David Huntley.
A good part of my 100 quarter hours at S.I.U.-E. was studying printmaking under Robert Malone (a concert pianist in his background) directly and James Butler, indirectly. S.I.U.-E. was know for it's figurative and rendering work and Malone and Butler (lithography at the time) had a lot to do with it. Throughout grad school I would continue to discuss aesthetics with several of my professors. Bob Malone once pulled me aside and said, "I wish you would make art as much as you talk about it." I did well in my art history courses and enjoyed discussing contemporary art issues with Floyd Coleman. Along with Malone and Butler, Dennis Ringering had a major influence in drawing.
Ironically, I minored in sculpture but we had such a turn over in teachers that I never came to know them. I remember more my fellow graduate students.
The advantages of a small graduate school is that I got to know most of the 25 faculty as well as the graduate students who would go on to become accomplished faculty in their own right. This is where I became friends with the Arturo Sandoval who was teaching the new studio of fiber arts and this is where I became friends with the sculptor and now blacksmith, Thomas Gipe.
My first faculty position was at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire where I taught and exhibited printmaking and sculpture along with basic design and occasionally taught painting and drawing. While there I was selected by Jan van der Marck to exhibit sculpture and paintings at Dartmouth College where he was the director of the Hopkins Center at that time. We stayed in touch over the years and during the late 90's he purchased one of my "Watch Dogs" for his home while he was the Director of 20th Century Art at the Detroit Institute of Art.
In 1978 I moved on to found the art major program and establish an art department at Houghton College in upstate New York. While there I taught painting, sculpture and art history along with the administrative duties of starting the new art major. After starting the art program, I was fired by the administration of that Christian college because my "expectations were too high for the present level of the art department". This happened late in the academic year so there was no time to find another position and I moved my family to Columbus Ohio where my brother, David, provided a home for us to live. Compounding the problem, this was a time when only women and actual minorities were being hired by university art departments to make up for previous social injustices and I was caught in the web of political corrections taking place at the time. I believe this gap in teaching was when I fell out of the academic net because it raised questions in many search committees. This falling out of academe may have been a blessing in disguise because my career as a full-time artist exhibiting in the art market really took off, especially in the contemporary craft movement.
In this present time of specialization, I mention the above as credentials for understanding and forming opinions on methods and issues in various visual art studios and this experience has served me well when I act as a juror or curator today. On one occasion as a juror for the Columbus Arts Festival, many artists were impressed with my ability to carry on a conversation about their materials and process in all media.
I believe my experience in art history and in the academy has given an overview of where art has been and where it is going. I am bothered by a lot of what is called art today. I'm bothered by political correctness and the rise of politics over aesthetics in academe. I'm bothered by the deconstruction that has taken place in all aspects of our culture and education. I bothered that the art of reason and critical thinking has been lost to a mindset of fashion, immediate gratification and blindly following the cause de jour. But I'm not just another whining baby boomer. This overview also gives me hope and that is something about which I want to write.